And not even British. For example most of the Enigma decryption was the genius work of a Polish man. Britain received the immigration of half the Nobel prices of the world in a couple years as the jews escaped nazism.
The original Bomba was the genius work of a Polish man, but was no use from 1938-1939 when the Enigma cipher was strengthened. At which point the Turing-Welchman Bombe was developed. The Battle of the Atlantic ran between 1939 and 1945.
For the much harder Lorenz cipher used by German High Command from 1940, the Colossus machine was developed by Tommy Flowers at the GPO and became operational in 1944.
None of which involved the US Navy, which was my original point.
As an attractive person myself that studied engineering in several countries of Europe and some years in the US I don't believe there are many opportunities for you to take advantage of your attractiveness. Most examinations were in written form.
I have huge doubts about the study. In cinema, theatre, sure, you need physical presence, but engineering... I don't believe Von Newman would have needed presence to impress other people.
Another very important thing is that there are very important differences between sexes. The most physically attractive man in the world without the proper attitude and without leadership and success is nobody.
I am what is called a sigma male. I was never interested in power, dominating others, being the boss. Women prefer ugly and short people if they are leaders to tall and beautiful man that are not social.
In fact, if you get uglier as you age but get more successful, you will receive way more attention. If you command a group of people, run a company or are a big boss, women will get in love.
Also, if you are tall and beautiful, men will get envious of you.
Billy Bob Thornton dating Angelina Jolie is the quintessential example of this. He had presence and charisma but was very average lookswise. Claviculars head would explode if he saw a picture of them together.
I'm not sure what or why you use AI for this text (translation?) but even in foreign language universities, it is "von Neumann" - wouldn't be translated as your AI did.
It must be said: Mr Ford created way more wealth in the world than what it destroyed.
For example, the Japanese discovered that importing Ford cars from Japan was cheaper that manufacturing those in Japan, including all the shipping cost.
The same happened in Russia, Germany and most places of the West world.
The new manufacturing method was a revolution that have generated trillions.
I think what they're getting at here is that it's cheaper for countries to import the car from themselves because you don't have to cover the cost of manufacturing, just the cost of transport (which is low, because you are importing it from yourself).
And now an authoritarian one-party country (I think it's decidedly sliding into a dictatorship) is winning car manufacturing - and possibly almost all of manufacturing except high-end semiconductors and optics.
Gets undue credit for assembly lines, guns and pocket watches were moving that way too, I wonder what middle school history book publisher cemented his legacy
I don’t understand why you’re downvoted. Hitler considered him an inspiration and praised him in Mein Kampf. Ford funded and published “The Dearborn Independent” which was a newspaper full of libel against Jews. Sure he was a visionary industrialist, but also a vile human being.
So is Elon Musk and yet he is the richest man on Earth, has meddled in government freely and fanboys still believe every fart that is coming out of him.
He used to be into making cars too but that clearly fell off the wayside
... and has very little respect here. Some fanboys aren't a guide to amount of respect one deserves, regardless of topic.
I must say he redeemed himself tiny little bit in my eyes when he blocked russian use of starlink in their war in Ukraine, I didn't register any apparent reason apart from stopping murdering of civilians by russians, but thats been happening during whole war in non-trivial numbers. But he also famously sabotaged their naval drones mid attack by disabling all of them during early phase of the war, to not sink half of black sea naval fleet at one go, so... a complicated, highly unreliable person.
I think everybody can easily find deep flaws in him, be them personal or professional (ie he is POS father based on many accounts for example, thats not flying with most parents that know this). Then it matters if folks have firm hard-to-bend moral values or are more flexible with them. Based on experience most people are quite a bit flexible, otherwise they would have to hate themselves too a lot.
That is not what I said. The gp used the term "antisemitic" which by definition means having a negative opinion on semites. You are looking to argue semantics while I'm trying to answer a question.
Would you at least allow a distinction between having theories about Jews and publishing theories about Jews?
Parent poster wasn’t disparaging Ford for merely committing WrongThink, IMO it’s quite another thing to support a newspaper to put your libel in front of the public to misinform and cast ire against a race of people
To be clear I don’t think Ford should have been prevented from publishing his opinion, as an American I am a free speech hardliner, but I do think we can decide not to celebrate people based on their public speech and actions
Oh yeah, because Norway is very representative of the world...
A country that is bigger than half Spain with 10 times less population with one of the lowest electrify prices of the entire world(5-8 dollars MWh) because of huge hydro resources.
A country with huge capital reserves precisely because of oil resources.
He also cut 80% of the traffic... And the fact that it kept running with him willy nilly pulling network cables is a credit to the work they did to make it resilient to failure.
I don't have it at hand, but if you look at all the products and apis they cut - and then all the users who abandoned it in the first few months, I think that's how this was derived.
I don't understand this take. Do people think engineers go in to work to turn handcranks to keep the machines running? It's actually a credit to the automation built by the engineers he fired that it kept running!
At the time I joked that like Chaos Monkey, we should have an "Elon Monkey" to "fire" arbitrary people by sending them on mandatory vacations with no connectivity to see what falls over.
the people that built the infrastructure that runs twitter left before he showed up. most of it was written by a half dozen people that left around 2016.
First thing: No it is not normal thing to be alone. We humans are social animals. Once we are isolated we usually die soon, so take that seriously.
Being isolated from your tribe used to be a worse punishment than death. The greeks called that punishment ostracism. El mio Cid was the Spanish representative case.
In the US there is an epidemy of loneliness.
So, what to do? First recognise that this is a problem and do not dig deeper. Do not isolate yourself more. Do not play vdeogames, do not read books until you fix it.
My main advice is to stop thinking too much about yourself, think about others.
I was into religious(Cristian catholic) orgs and I helped old people(something I did not like), I helped poor people on the streets(liked it more) and I helped drug addicts and war refugees.
Helping drug addicts were a pain on the aßß, but once you make someone get out, he or she becomes a friend for life. It is like the friendships that are done in fighters of a war. Once you have put your life on the hands of someone else and trusted someone else so much, nothing can break that friendship.
If you think about that in a meta way, I was helping people that were marginalised, that were alone, and in the process I could not be alone. I did it in a religious group(a tribe in itself)
Thanks to this experience I can make friends very fast in a new place, something few adults know how to do.
If you are going to read, read a book called "How to influence people and make friends", but do not read the new book that is a badly revised book by the incompetent descendants of the writer, read the old original book.
But reading books is not going to help because you need action first, not reflection, and action is going to be painful for a while, and you have to endure the pain until it becomes easy. The best advise is to get out there, try hard, fail spectacularly and only then read the book.
Stop thinking about yourself, me, me and me. We are not wired to work for us alone. We are worked for working for others: Our tribe, our children, our family.
Instead of not trying to be alone, focusing on yourself (me, me and me) start thinking on helping other people that are alone. Start thinking on creating your own tribe or joining a new tribe. It can be a maker space, a group for hiking or helping or teaching kids.
I've seen people mention "How to influence people and make friends" before. I finally decided I'll read it. The PDF is available here for anyone else interested in following along :)
Edit: though this seems like it may not be the edition you meant? The cover says "the original is still the best", but this seems to be a revised edition.
Follow the above advice as its great :) People need each other. Volunteering, apart from being worthwhile for its own sake, is one of the best ways to meet people and put your own life in perspective. There's a ton of stuff in the world that needs doing, that capitalism leaves un-done as there's no money to be made in it. It can either be directly helping people such as providing food, resources, support for homeless, supporting people with disabilities to participate in activities, generally helping others in some sort of need. Or things like tree-planting which helps everyone. Some of, either the people you help, or fellow volunteers, or both, will become great companions. Can also be a great way to find another partner ;) Some of the most happiest most stable couples my wife and I know, met volunteering - its a good foundation for a relationship, that both people sought to go out and help others even before they met each other.
Not that surprising if you consider that books before the Gutenberg printing press were artisans work of art that required years of work of specialists.
In other words: Today some of those will cost more than a Ferrari to make. They use Vellum paper that is much better that today's but require killing hundreds of animals each.
Only very rich people could afford that. I had access to European books collections of the 16th that are in Color, much much better than any normal book we have.
If you think about that it is normal. Color require more printing plates in a printer, but just changing your ink if you do it manually.
> They use Vellum paper that is much better that today's but require killing hundreds of animals each.
Yes, but also, it's more of byproduct. You raise sheep for wool, they're going to lamb every year, you eat most of the lambs, someone buys some of the skins to turn onto vellum.
The processing to produce vellum would be expensive, and not something every shepherd would be making at home, but the input sheepskin would be plentiful.
I would say that the real reason is because "it works". As simple as that.
The first thing you need when you make something new is making it work, it is much better that it works badly than having something not working at all.
Take for example the Newcomen engine, with an abysmal efficiency of half a percent. You needed 90 times more fuel than an engine today, so it could only be used in the mines were the fuel was.
It worked badly, but it worked. Later came efficiency.
The same happened with locomotives. So bad efficiency at first, but it changed the world.
The first thing AI people had to do is making it work in all OSes. Yeah, it works badly but it works.
We downloaded some Clojure editor made in java to test if we were going to deploy it in our company. It gave us some obscure java error in different OSes like linux or Mac configurations. We discarded it. It did not work.
We have engineers and we can fix those issues but it is not worth it. The people that made this software do not understand basic things.
We have Claude working in hundreds of computers with different OSes. It just works.
Related to your answer, I would say the reason is that it works good enough for now and it can always be patched later. Back in the good old days that we remember, software was frozen on a gold master disc, which was then tested for weeks or months before its public release. The fact that bugs could not easily be fixed in the field meant they would incur support costs or lost revenue with people returning their purchased software box.
In my opinion that is the true reason why the old native software was developed to such a high standard. But then once online stores and shrink wrap agreements made it impossible to return buggy software, then the financial incentives shifted towards shipping a partially broken product.
Who cares about pleasing with good performance when you can instead keep customers hostage?
Your examples of engines are less about "it works" as more that it does a thing we couldn't do before and it works better than the previous thing. But neither of those are especially true of react.
React was an instant hit because it had the facebook brand behind it and everyone was tired of angular. But ultimately, react has worse outcomes for developers, users, and businesses. On the web, react websites are bloating. They run slower, their javascript payloads are larger, and they take longer to load.
Your suggestion -- that it works and then it gets more efficient later -- would make sense if we lived in a world where react moved off the virtual dom model. A virtual dom is a fine first attempt or prototype but we can do better. We know how. Projects like SolidJS do do better. React has not caught up, but it is still very popular. This whole "It worked badly, but it worked. Later came efficiency" thing is complete nonsense.
And there are loads of businesses that started off with an angular app, started to migrate to react, then started to migrate to react hooks, now switching to whatever the latest methodology is. Time and again you find these products, always endlessly migrating to the new thing, most of them never finishing a migration before beginning a new one. So these products end up being a chimera of four different frameworks held together with pain.
This isn't a good outcome for businesses, or for users, and it's not a good developer experience. react is stagnant and surviving off of being the default or the status quo and supported by tech companies that have long since stopped innovating and subsist on rent seeking. Developers choose react because nobody was ever fired for buying IBM and because they can look busy at their job, and because they buy a new phone and laptop every year with the latest hardware that can compensate for the deteriorating software they ship.
> React was an instant hit because it had the facebook brand behind it and everyone was tired of angular.
Ok, but why was everyone tired of Angular? Sure, web frameworks are examples of Fad Driven Development to the extreme, but Angular.js, was pure unmitigated ARSE.
Made ten bindings on a page? That's 100 cross connections. Made 100 two-way bindings? that's 10000 connections.
Clicked one way through fields A, B then started typing, they show same data. Clicked through fields A and C, now they are bound but B isn't. Clicked B then C, congrats all three of your bindings suddenly start filling in.
It was a combination of shitty performance scaling and unintuitive Angular data flow that primed everyone for React to take over.
I would prefer the old-school approach to wrapping the "Claude bits" in a per-platform framework (or if you really can't be bothered, a platform-specific command-line tool that could then be called natively from the program).
The UI wrapper then could be Electron, or something a little more platform-native you hand off to some junior engineers.
> The first thing you need when you make something new is making it work, it is much better that it works badly than having something not working at all.
It is better for something to not exist than for a shitty version to exist. Software doesn't get better over time, it gets worse. If you make a bad, suboptimal choice today chances are that solution becomes permanent. It's telling that all of your examples of increasing efficiency are not software.
They could have done better. They chose the path of least resistance, putting in the least amount of effort, spending the least amount of resources into accomplishing a task.
There's nothing "good" about electron. Hell, there are even easier ways of getting high performance cross platform software out there. Electron was used because it's a default, defacto choice that nobody bothered with even researching or testing if it was the right choice, or even a good choice.
"It just works". A rabid raccoon mashing its face on a keyboard could plausibly produce a shippable electron app. Vibe-bandit development. (This is not a selling point.) People claiming to be software developers should aim to do better.
> They could have done better. They chose the path of least resistance, putting in the least amount of effort, spending the least amount of resources into accomplishing a task
You might as well tell reality to do better: The reality of physics (water flows downhill, electricity moves through the best conductor, systems settle where the least energy is required) and the reality of business (companies naturally move toward solutions that cost less time, less money, and less effort)
I personally think that some battles require playing within the rules of the game. Not to wish for new rules. Make something that requires less effort and resources than Electron but is good enough, and people will be more likely to use it.
Shaming the use of electron? I'll do that every day and twice on sunday. Same with nonsense websites that waste gigabytes on bloat, spam users with ads, and feed the adtech beast. And I'll lay credit for this monument to enshittification we call the internet at the feet of Google and Facebook and Microsoft.
Using electron and doing things shittily is a choice. If you're ever presented with a choice between doing something well and not, do the best you can. Electron is never the best choice. It's not even the easiest, most efficient choice. It's the lazy, zero effort, default, ad-hoc choice picked by someone who really should know better but couldn't be bothered to even try.
Cosmopolitan can be used to bundle up any gui package, and your code, and a team of professional software devs should be able to cope with it just fine. You end up with a native executable with a slightly bigger package to ship, since it's carrying executables for various platforms, but you'd effectively have the same code and behavior everywhere. A few extra megabytes, instead of whatever the hell electron is doing.
They could also use Java, or even one of the electron type clones that attempt to be better, like Tauri.
The point isn't that electron is so awful. It's that the company with the purportedly best coding AI and one of the best overall AI models in the world chose to do the absolute tawdriest, cheapest, even laziest thing without any consideration of what the right thing to do might be, or what thing they could do that demonstrated their excellence and mastery of craft, or at a bare minimum, the advanced capabilities of the AI.
Cursor used claude to build a browser from scratch; it's not like their AI couldn't do it.
I don’t code, so I’m well out of my league but this point of “premier coding AI company should showcase its capabilities by using their own model to build superior software” rings true to me, right? Especially as we start to discuss AI as more dangerous than nuclear weapons
yet it can’t even do that?
It might be a strange thing to say, but Java is still viable alternative route. You can build a nice and fast cross-platform desktop application on it today. The language was designed for this kind of things. The entry barrier is quite high though.
As far as I can tell after a quick Google, you can't share your Qt UI with the browser version of your app. Considering that "lite" browser-based versions of apps are a very common funnel to a more featureful desktop version, it makes sense to just use the UI tools that already work and provide a common experience everywhere.
The same search incidentally turned up that Qt requires a paid license for commercial projects, which is surprising to me and obviously makes it an even less attractive choice than Electron. Being less useful and costing more isn't a great combo.
> you can't share your Qt UI with the browser version of your app
You can with WASM (but you shouldn't).
> Qt requires a paid license for commercial projects
It doesn't, it requires paid license if you don't want to abide with (L)GPL license, which should be fair deal, right? You want to get paid for your closed-source product, so you should not have any reservations about paying for their product that enables you to create your product, right? Or is it "money for me, but not for thee"?
> Being less useful and costing more isn't a great combo.
Very nice, but now explain why you are talking about using Qt to create apps, whereas grandparent talks about experience with apps created with Qt.
I looked up the WASM Qt target and it renders to a canvas, which hampers accessibility. The docs even call out that this approach barely works for screen readers [0], and that it provides partial support by creating hidden DOM elements. This creates a branch of differing behavior between your desktop and browser app that doesn't have to exist at all with Electron.
It should go without saying that the requirements of the LGPL license are less attractive than the MIT one Electron has, fairness doesn't really come into it. Beyond the licensing hurdles that Qt devotes multiple pages of its website to explaining, they also gate commercial features such as "3D and graphs capabilities" [1] behind the paid license price, which are more use cases that are thoroughly covered by more permissively licensed web projects that already work everywhere.
On your last point I'm completely lost; it's late here so it might be me but I'm not sure what distinction you're making. I guess I interpreted dmix' comment generally to be about the process of producing software with either approach given that my comment above was asking for details on alternatives from the perspective of a developer and not a user. I don't have any personal beef with using apps that are written with Qt.
I do frontend work so struggle to get over how bad most Qt GUIs are. They are far out of date compared to Gnome or MacOS in a lot of the small widget details and menus.
Plus I use Mac these days and Qt apps just never looked right on that platform.
As a recent toe-dipper into linux (now running Arch on a powerful minipc and KDE plasma) I'm shocked at how little progress has been made on the native UI side.
Well, it's not that surprising, considering that as soon as something radically new appears, there is always some mistreatment from all sides: platform owners, app developers and users.
Windows' Metro/Modern UI was pretty good from different perspectives, but didn't have enough effort put into it to make it a universal thing fit for multiple purposes (half of the Windows settings was still in Control Panel for quite some time), wasn't familiar for users (so they hated it) and wasn't familiar for developers (so they created hideous apps).
In the opposing Linux camp, GNOME made Gtk 4 with Libadwaita UI library with "everything is a phone app" mindset that not every app can adopt. For example, there's no application menu (a line with File, View, Edit, etc.) component shipped by default, you should make it yourself or get it somewhere. So now GIMP is developed using Gtk 3 (not modern 4) because it has all the components GIMP needs. Trying to get GNOME developers to implement some stuff outside of their vision is a futile effort.
Please do continue to waste energy on doing something that will do nothing but allow you to feel superior about yourself. In fact, you will probably waste more energy than Electron ever has.
I agree with you, I even think it's shameful. When I saw it was elctron, I sighted so long I almost choked.
Can't even cmd+g nor shift+cmd+f to search, context menu has nothing. Can't even swipe, no gestures etc.
ELctron is better than nothing, and I'm grateful, but it tastes bitter.
As for performance, somebody if I remember correctly, once asked here "what's the point of 512GB RAM on the mac Studio?"
And then someone replied "so you can run two electron apps".
We always have the first wave of naive and well intentioned people. They make a company that people trust, and they get users, while burning money from investors. Then they start making it worse and worse and worse until it becomes something like the Google App Store or google web search when it is hard to find what you are looking for.
Ads are so dangerous in AI because they will include ads inside the LLVM. When I ask "Who is the best whatever?" "Which product should I buy?" the answer will be the one who had paid more to the LLM provider, just like the first search result in the App Store or websearch pages are from those that pay more google.
Actually IT IS different. Actually if they manage to create a viable small nuclear reactors or Quantum computers the world will change like it changed with the Watt thermal engine.
Why he is not talking about the Internet, trains, electricity, nuclear bombs, rockets,aviation or engines? Because they worked, like AI works today.
All of them were bubbles at the time and they changed the world forever. AI is changing the world AND it is a bubble.
AI is here to stay. It will improve and it will have consequences. The fact that a robot could do things with its hands is actually significant, whenever you like it or not.
And not even British. For example most of the Enigma decryption was the genius work of a Polish man. Britain received the immigration of half the Nobel prices of the world in a couple years as the jews escaped nazism.
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